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Letter: The Art of Social Change

Kwame Anthony Appiah makes the wonderful point (Oct. 24) that if Westerners and Europeans were more culturally sensitive to local contexts and worked with villagers rather than “parachute in with Western values and ideas,” change might be better adapted to local needs. I’m glad Appiah uses foot binding in China as his chief positive example of change rather than female genital cutting (F.G.C.) — not “mutilation,” as your subtitle suggests. I remember being in Kenya in 1980 when women from that country came back from the U.N. conference on the status of women in Copenhagen, angered by Western women’s cultural insensitivity to what Kenyan (and other African) women viewed as their issue. Female circumcision is limited to northern Africa and along the eastern coast. It was rarely seen in central and southern Africa. It is time that The Times Magazine adopted the more appropriate term “cutting,” which both Appiah and Nicholas Kristof use in their articles, rather than the socially charged term “mutilation.” Times reporters have changed over the past 10 years and adopted F.G.C. as the operative term. It’s time the magazine followed suit.

JEAN DAVISON, PH.D.Austin, Tex.

A version of this letter appears in print on November 14, 2010, on page MM10 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: LETTERS; The Art of Social Change. Today's Paper|Subscribe